I have to admit, I love to paint. Not pictures as such, but walls. I discover a certain satisfaction in rubbing away what is old and dirty with the steady, repetitive swish of a brush or roller. I can understand why so many people like to renovate homes. They have the opportunity to transform a space completely… to create their own little piece of heaven out of something that maybe wasn’t so heavenly.
I think some of us throw ourselves into home improvements (and many other types of improvements) so much because, deep down, we are longing for our truest, most perfect home. The one we haven’t arrived at yet. We try and pull a little piece of heaven onto the earth. We try and create ‘the ideal’ in a very non-ideal world.
I just discovered a C.S. Lewis quote which delighted me:
“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing – to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from – my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.” – Psyche from Till We Have Faces.
This encapsulates for me the desire for home that I often feel. This sense of incompleteness…
And it explains why I long to create beauty here, in its various forms. Because I was created to experience it. To revel in it. To enjoy it as one who knows God intimately – the original maker of all things.
So I shall continue to rest with the longing, knowing that one day it will lead me home – “the place where all the beauty came from”. Because then it will not be the end, but truly, a glorious returning.
It's a God thing... 
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